Fine

Ok, I’ve been instructed to write something new for once for God’s sake.

Well, fine. Here it is:

There’s a girl, and she’s here, and I have to sign off now. ‘Nuff said.

The Bar Scene

DATELINE WINTER 2006, BUCKHEAD AREA, ATLANTA, GA — Some friends and I went out to a bar last night, to listen to another friend play in his cover band, “Corporate America”. He plays bass, and sings a bit. He did a really good job, actually, although I’m undecided about the band in general. I mean, it’s a three-piece guitar/bass/drums playing 80’s and 90’s covers. So… you know… *shrug*

But that’s not what I’d like to discuss here. I want to bitch about the bar scene.

We got to the bar, and it was fairly crowded. A selection of youngish boys and girls, dressed fairly nicely in their sweaters and pants and such. The guys all looked very healthy in that frat-boy kind of way, and the girls all had their straight hair brushed and that flippy thing going on at the bottom. Lots of shoulder-length bobs.

Most of the girls were normal, but there was a sprinkling of girls who were just trying waaaay too hard. One girl had this weird-ass silver belt, not really holding up anything, and a sweater, which might have been cashmere, but was probably not because she had tied this little knot tied in the back, which lifted the bottom of the sweater to reveal some midriff/hip. It was WEIRD. I mean, hey, I’m all for midriffs, and I have to admit that on the right girl the fashion of short shirts is really attractive. But tying a knot in the back of your sweater seems like a misconceived attempt at sartorial creativity. Baby, Project Runway this ain’t. It’s a fake Irish bar in Buckhead. Don’t fuck up a perfectly good sweater.

At one point there was some feedback over the PA. It was loud, it was painful, you know the drill. It was feedback, you know? Who hasn’t heard feedback? You wince, you hold your ears, you understand that sometimes it happens and nobody does it intentionally. Play it casual. Well, knot-girl winced and held her ear, but also turned and looked at the band with this WITHERING look of absolute DISGUST on her face. Play it up a little more girl. What was she trying to accomplish? It was totally an act, but I couldn’t figure out who the audience was. Was she trying to look superior… to the BAND?

Many of the girls seemed to be there with guys, and the rest seemed to be there with girlfriends, you know, kind of a girls-night-out sort of deal. There didn’t seem (to me) to be a whole lot of mingling of singles who hadn’t known each other before that night. Which was strange to me. Isn’t that supposed to be the idea? Ok, maybe it’s not. Maybe the idea is to just go out with some friends, talk, drink, and have fun. But that leads me to the next point.

How in the HELL could that place have been any fun to hang out? I was there to hear the band, so the music was the point. But if you were there to hang out, not listening to the band really except when they played a song you like (some people would sing along once they heard something they recognized), it was too loud to hear yourself think, much less talk to a friend. Is there no alternative? I mean, you have to YELL at each other to speak. Is there some kind of privacy involved in having only the person you’re yelling at understand you? Maybe. Perhaps that’s the thing. You can have a private conversation in the middle of a crowd, by virtue of the din surrounding you.

But me, I want to sit quietly, preferably in a booth, and speak in a normal tone of voice. If I’m there to hear the music, it’s one thing. But for conversation? I’d rather be anywhere than a loud club or bar. It’s easier to have a conversation in a power plant. There has to be a better way. A more pleasant place to congregate, an easier way to meet people. But we’ve had a thousand years to find one, and bars with loud music and a meat market are still around. But on second thought, remember how I said most of the people there seemed to be with someone already? Is that loud bar really their idea of a good time spent with good friends, or a significant other? Jesus. I would so much rather be bowling.

After a while, say around midnight, all the girls left. It was freaky. Suddenly I looked around and aside from the girls we were with (my friend Rob’s wife, and the bassist’s wife), the ratio had become like 7/1 in favor of guys.

Maybe the girls all left because the place just plain STANK. They have a patio with these gas heaters, which apparently don’t burn all that efficiently, because every time the door to the patio opened, there was this waft of gas smell. Rob said it smelled like cabbage. John the bassist said it smelled like ass. We came to a consensus that it really smelled like cabbage that had been in someone’s ass. Ass-cabbage.

But I have no idea why the guys were sticking around. They seemed kind of aimless, like they just didn’t have anywhere else to go, so they were just staying where they were. Lost. Like “hey bra, where the honeys go”. Dude, they took a look at your fuckin’ Izod sweater and decided they had better things to do in less stanky environs.

There was one group of four guys who had basically hung out with each other all night, doing guy things like punching each other on the shoulder and doing something weird with a straw. At one point one of the guys was doing something to his drink, and this girl kind of RUSHED over and took the straw out of his hand. I have no idea why, but she seemed kind of perturbed.

But it wasn’t a case of a stranger-girl flirting with a guy from across the room; apparently they were together. You know how you can tell a couple who’s just plain together vs. one who just hooked up? They were together. But when this guy left, the group of guys he had (I guess) been performing for (previously mentioned) stuck around. They had been standing, then they migrated to some tables. Sat, stood, sat, drank a little more, basically looking drunk and lost. They were still there when we left.

As for my party, we stuck around to hear the band play “Born to Run”, because John the Bassist has a solo in that one and his wife was waiting to listen to him. Testify, brother! It was a pretty pleasant way to end the evening, all things considered. It’s a good solo. Good times. I like those guys, and since we had been there to hear the band it was a nice evening. Aside from the stank.

But as for all those kids, and any singles who had been there looking to hook up or experience that lightning-strike of a connection with someone, I can’t help but contemplate the contextual truth behind Mr. Springsteen’s timeless lyrics, which now seem so appropriate to that bar, and that moment:

Someday girl I don’t know when
We’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go
And we’ll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us
Baby we were born to run

Good luck, kids. If bars like this are the best we can do for you, the species is doomed.

Hunger Pangs

It’s July 4th, 2007, and I’m lying around waiting for my friends to come over so we can go do patriotic stuff like drink beer and eat hot dogs and stuff. But in the meantime, I have enough time to stroke down a few words of introspection on a timeless topic that will never get old– my own head. So happy birthday, America, and now on with what’s really important: me.

I think I’ve been spoiled forever, by the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen, and society’s general infatuation with the idea of romantic love. Last night I saw “Knocked Up”, and although I liked it and found it very funny, it made me sad.

For one thing, I’ve got this heretofore-unknown biological clock ticking away. It cropped up suddenly a few years ago; maybe I’ve mentioned this before. I never thought I cared much one way or the other about having children. But it turns out that I do. I want kids, and seeing people having kids makes me feel a strange mix of joy, jealousy, and despair. So “Knocked Up” depressed me that way, in that sort of Lifetime movie way, where your eyes tear up and you’re all “god I hope nobody sees me this way before the lights come up”.

The other way that “Knocked Up” tugged on my heartstrings is with this whole geek/princess dichotomy at the center. Princess has one-night-stand with geek, proceeds to fall in love with him, sees his inner beauty, reveals some of her inner ugliness, everything turns out OK in the end. But the end never resonated for me as much as the middle parts where she’s deciding that they’re “just too different” and “it wouldn’t be fair of me to drag you into a relationship with me”… after the scene where she’s looking at his apartment and being disgusted by his possessions. After the scene where she’s embarrassed to have him meet her friends. After the scene where she goes mental in the middle of the street and kicks him out of the car.

I’m not sure what Apatow was trying to do with all of these scenes, because they really make the woman, “Allison” look terrible, to my eyes. Do women come away thinking her actions were justified? And then he’s made to come back and apologize… for something… I’m never quite sure why he’s the one who has to be apologetic. Perhaps that’s the point, and the movie is just illuminating the interaction between men and women. But that’s the thing, man, I already know it works that way. You don’t need to point that shit out to me, because it’s right there in my memory and I came to the movies to get away from that bullcrap.

I realize, of course, that many people won’t react this way. They’ll see the characters sort of mimicking events and relationships in their own lives, and they’ll crack up in a recognition response. I rarely have that response these days. A few months ago, a friend and I went to see “Spamalot”, which is this musical based on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Of course, being a good and responsible geek, I know a lot about that film. Not as much as some, but I’ve seen it enough to know all the famous lines, and they make me laugh still.

But the audience for Spamalot was apparently a lot more invested in Monty Python than I, because much of the performance left me cold, while the audience was laughing and clapping everytime the book trotted out another classic Python joke. It wasn’t enough for me. It’s not enough any more for someone to just hold up a mirror to my life. It’s got to be a magical mirror that twists my life and shows it from an angle I’ve never seen before. Show me what my ass looks like to everyone else, or something like that. Well, as long as it looks *good*. Which means don’t show it, ’cause I’ve got my father’s butt and that’s only something to be tolerated, not celebrated.

All this butt-talk reminds me, naturally, of my original premise for this post. Romatic love. Everywhere I go, everywhere I look, my rose-colored glasses are tainted by an impression that there should be somebody out there who fits with me and will understand. It darkens the lenses. They become poo-colored glasses. Gross.

It’s a common malaise, I know. I’m by no means unique, and now you know you aren’t either, if you happen to be sharing the disease with me right now.

I say “right now” because it comes and goes doesn’t it? Lately more comes than goes for me personally, but I recognize that tomorrow the chemicals in my brain may be aligned in such proportions that it won’t matter to me that I’m not “being gotten” at the moment.

Lying here in my bed, I’m listening to Debussy. There are other people in the world who like to listen to Debussy, but lying here just now I had the hubris to assume that that cross-section of the population will never line up with the cross-section of people who can deal with the fact that I can eat pizza four days a week and be happy, and that even should those two parts of the Venn diagram intersect, what are the odds that they’ll intersect with the infuriatingly difficult to locate circle that surrounds the women (because, alas, they must be women) I’ll find physically attractive. That circle seems to be at like, 50% transparency. Hard to see, hard to figure out, and basically never there when you need it.

Yeah, so I’m feeling rather pathetic today, and if you’ve read this far I do apologize for my current (and seemingly constant) maudlinity. Here’s hoping that writing it down and spitting it on the face of the Internet helps settle my rage a bit.

And it is a kind of rage. I’m pretty angry at my own failure to discover, and the world’s unwillingness to produce, somebody that fits. Angry at my failure to accept the ones that almost fit, and just get on with my life. Angry at my failure to recognize the ones that might have fit had I not been stupid and young and fascinated by shiny things over there. Angry at the ones that I thought fit but who didn’t share the opinion and left me wondering what just happened. Angry at the years and still more years wasted by ennui, inertia, fear, and a stubborn inability to admit when I’ve failed. Sometimes that stubbornness serves me in good stead, but in the big questions of life, like “do I change my major” or “should we break up” that stubbornness has been treacherous to my happinness.

At the moment, it’s to the point where even if there’s a glimmer of hope I instantly start to think of the parts of me that will have to be subordinated to any relationship, because she just won’t understand and I can’t stand to have her not understand. I hope I can get over that particular foible, because it’s completely ridiculous of me to expect to have every nook and cranny “gotten” by any other person. Here’s where that idealistic idea of romantic love rears up and takes a fang-toothed bite out of my just-tolerable butt.

Maybe I should give up on the idea. I read this book by Steven Brust recently, called “Cowboy Feng’s Space-Time Bar and Grill”, in which everyone who is in love at the beginning or falls in love during the course of events either dies in bloody violence or is horribly betrayed by their loved one. And it’s about saving the universe, for some reason, even though it’s all futile and everybody sucks and nothing is any good when you’re not either drunk or listening to music.

Books like that are usually more concerned with illuminating the duplicity of mankind in the face of his innate nobility and compulsion to survive than they are about having a fully-rounded emotional core. Basically, you can’t ever be happy for very long, but keep on living anyway. God, Brust, what the were you trying to accomplish with that book? Total downer masquerading as a light action-romp, with a whimsical cover painting that fooled me completely. Sucked me in with bright colors, got me committed with some interesting action and premise, then proceeded to break my heart and depress me completely for days afterward. I expressed this sentiment in an Amazon review. Take that!

It just contributes to my sense of inadequacy when it comes to dealing with romantic issues. These are life-skills I never picked up. Never picked up that ability to just deal and move on. Never took the class about how to just go to bed or date someone casually. How do you date casually? I read this blog where some kid (has to be a kid in his 20’s) writes about the match.com dates he goes on. Seemingly every woman he meets wants to make out with him. He’s always making out, and very often going further than that.

I’ve lost enough of my natural gullibility (I had a lot to spare) to understand that he could be making it all up, even though my first inclination is still to believe what he says. Regardless of that, I just don’t understand the mindset of “making out.” How do you make out with someone and just leave it lying in the street afterwards? I’ve always taken a kiss as a promise, as intent, as a statement of opinion. I have a hard time seeing a kiss as a singular event with nothing more to it than a physical act that happens to be lots of fun.

But then, I never made out in high school. Another skill never developed.

I think it’s working. I feel a little better, and right now, this minute, it’s OK that I’ll probably never find that pretty girl who like Debussy and pizza and doesn’t mind that I read stupid science fiction novels like “Cowboy Feng’s Space-Time Bar & Grill”. I hope you’ll note that I didn’t say she had to read them herself. She just has to not mind that I do. Actually it’s more than that; I’d really rather she just respect my taste and consider that since I like it maybe there’s something to it even if she can’t see what that is.

Basically I want her to be a genius who thinks I’m a genius too, even as my actions prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m not. Oh, and she’s gotta be hot. A hot genius. Like Tara Reid in “Alone in the Dark”.

My soulmate would find that funny.